Introducing…Debris Stevenson
Debris Stevenson is loud, gritty and unafraid. Her poetry was born in London but has traveled as far as San Francisco with her collective, The Mouthy Poets.
Thirteen years after Dizzee Rascal’s debut album was released Debris remembers how it gave her permission to re-define success against the odds and become a spoken word artist.
Her work offers a fusion of poetry, grime and movement inspired by the flows of Dizzee Rascal’s genre defining album, Boy in da Corner — a step into a pirate radio station, teenage bedroom and house party as an outsider battles with finding their voice. There will be music, lyrics, poetry, dancing (if you’re that way inclined) and a story unfolding in-between the smoke, strobe and decks.
Interview
What makes your heart sing?
-Dancing, covered in paint, in the rain as the sun rises over the a docking yard in Trinidad.
-Pickled onion monster munch.
-130 teenagers sitting in hallways writing silently.
What makes your heart sink?
-Blazing Squad.
-Lychees (texture of eyeballs taste of perfumed armpits?)
-The absence of empathy.
This year’s festival theme is Love, so what does love mean to you? Is it the answer to the world’s problems?
Wow, thats a big one. To me personality, it is replying to my mums 48th consecutive Facebook message despite my impatience and dyslexia, playing with my god-son even after he removes the pillow from my head at 6am and the way my body yawns and rings to Grime. I think in a way it is - I think we need to show more love to the earth in particular as we are destroying it pretty rapidly. But also I think sometimes we are so consumed and preoccupied with love for things, food, money, fuel that we destroy ourselves and the world. We are so pre-occupied with a love of growth we often don’t consider sustainability.
Do you think love is simply constructed by society to make us feel like there is some point to all this? Or is it a bedrock of the human soul?
Kind of yes and yes to be honest! We are pattern seeking creatures and those patterns, that meaning drives us to create, evolve and change. I don’t even know if I believe in the idea of a soul as fact but I like the idea of it as a belief - just as art enables us to take on challenges and truths otherwise inconceivable with black and white… love gives us that shot of adrenaline we need to run for the prize/ finish line/ achieve the unachievable.